Branding is what shows your business or product is unique, identifiable, and desirable. Online branding ensures that process is not only present on the internet but also easy to find and digitally competitive with other comparable brands.
To create a successful online branding operation, its important to start with the basics of traditional branding and marketing: your business/product name, your logo, any relevant slogans or catchphrases, and so on. These create your brand identity which not only make your identity distinct, but also easy to remember and compelling. When done correctly, your brand identity should communicate what you do and make you appealing to customers in that market.
This all applies to your online branding too. Branding yourself online is a broad effort with many parts to it. They include your website and SEO (Search Engine Optimization), your social media, traditional media mentions online, and email marketing campaigns, to name a few. When you engage these different operations its important to reinforce traditional branding principles and update them to be optimized online. Specifically, this means your brand should be brief, punchy, easily spelled, and therefore easy to remember and identify.
To transfer these branding principles to the online world, we have to think of the different ways they are represented and found on the internet. For example, your brand’s website URL and social media handles should also be as easy to remember as your core banding is. Another important factor to consider is that the internet has encouraged bite-sized media consumption. This means things often get compressed to an even smaller fragment of the whole, so logos need to be identifiable on their own and ready to successfully represent the whole brand without relying on all the other branding components. For example: when we see the blue Twitter bird or bitten Apple on their own, we already know what they represent without needing more because their online branding is extremely effective. Of course, an easy way to do this is to link your logo with your name, like Google and Facebook have. Yet, even then, we often see these compressed into the only first letters – and we still recognize them!
Even though that process doesn’t happen right away, it is still something we now factor into our online branding strategies at Axel & Associates. We encourage others to consider this as well, whether for translating existing branding into a comprehensive online branding effort or for creating a completely new brand with everything baked-in for success in the long run. As we pointed out in our previous examples, in order to allow for your online branding to be designed for maximal dissemination, all the details matter, not just the name. That means we need to consider the font/typeface of your name and logo, the size, the colors, the thickness – all these subtle points are communicating something, and we want to be sure they flow with the right message and are in line with your brand.
Finally, once your online brand is ready to go, we use online marketing to promote it across the virtual landscape. The goal is that by the time we reach this step your branding is already hardwired to succeed in every way we promote it and will take to promotion like a fish to water. From there your business will be smoothly primed to thrive into whatever your goals are for your brand. That’s the power of effective online branding and why its essential to have a solid plan for it to navigate 21st century commerce.
Need help building your brand online? Call us at 866-DAVIDAXEL (866-328-4329) or dave@davidaxel.com
